Stinging Things

I love reading field guides. Brimming with information and diagrams helpfully labeled with arrows to the important bits of a bird, or snake, or ragweed that you need to make an identification, they are also, quite commonly, sources of unexpected poetry and startling imagery. I came upon just such a one in my reading about the Hymenoptera — the membrane-winged insects, including bees, ants and wasps. Sawflies, in their larval state, the National Audubon Society Field Guide to New England tells us, “when feeding communally on a piece of vegetation, will frantically wave about in unison if disturbed.” Videos online reveal it to be more of a group twitch than the mesmerizing undulations I had pictured, but the synchrony speaks to their membership in an order that includes the great bee and ant societies of the world. Honeybee colonies are among them. 

The plight of honeybees has drawn broad and appropriate concern, and it has been gratifying to see that concern expand to include pollinators more generally. Some bees and wasps are not pollinators, but so many species are that they are rightly associated with that work without which we would all starve to death. Walking in my unkempt garden this time of year, I might encounter seven or so species of pollinating insects in a 15-minute span. There are the metallic, glinting sweat bees; stocky bald-faced hornets; and the insect with perhaps the ultimate “call it like I see it” name: the great golden digger wasp. These wasps are great indeed, size-wise, and most conspicuous when constructing their underground nests. I have sat for almost an hour watching a digger wasp slip herself snugly into her burrow over and over, emerging with packet after packet of dirt as she expands her subterranean warren. 

For those of us who want to help pollinators and attract them to our gardens and yards, there is more to do than offer the right plants. The activities of insect pollinators are organized into two main categories: 1) evasion of death, and 2) sex, with the latter perhaps properly considered a subcategory of the former. Offering plants that provide nectar helps the insects accomplish their first objective, but a good garden supports them in the second, too, as they strive to reproduce and protect their young.

The digger wasps aren’t alone in their industrious construction of underground nests. Many species of ground bee will nest in any bare patch of sandy soil. A kempt green lawn and mulched garden beds are a wasteland to these animals. They are the main creatures I think of as I walk through the crabgrass-pocked dust bowl that makes up large swathes of my yard. We don’t keep a lawn, so whatever is not garden beds is either grown over in clover or is bare dirt. These are the digging fields of our wasps and bees, throwing up their little piles of dirt like a tiny prairie dog town. 

There are ways to make nearly any hymenopteran at home in your yard. Bee hotels built with bamboo tubes or holes drilled into a log will entice mason bees, but only as long as there is a rich source of mud nearby that they can use as mortar to seal their egg chambers. Enticing wildlife to a garden almost always involves some measure of mess, untidiness, allowances made. In ours, the carpenter bees excavate more and more of the planking on our shed each year, leaving cavitations and piles of sawdust where they’ve been. I am not pleased to see my shed slowly consumed, but I weigh the storage of kayaks and someday-to-be-repaired lawn mowers against the strong desires of the bees, and am resigned.